Of course there are probably many more things to learn, but it’s late and I can only think of two – both about how we use stimulus to help us understand people. Typically stimulus might be a concept or an adcept, and we’re trying to understand its potential for success and why, and how it might be optimised and why. But we can get a lot more from stimulus if we borrow some ideas from how Gehry approaches design.
1. Use stimulus to make people uncomfortable and explore that discomfort
Gehry talks about presenting “shrek” prototypes. On first encountering the quote (in Strategyzer’s training on business models and value propositions) I was trying and failing to make the connection between the Guggenheim and Dreamworks’ green monster. It turns out “shrek” means nervous in Yiddish. Gehry likes his prototypes to make the client nervous, so he can understand how they think and use this as an input for subsequent refinements. If we can make people uncomfortable with an idea, there’s a huge amount to learn from exploring what form that discomfort takes and why. In fact there’s just as much to learn as there is from a positive reaction, which tends to be what insights people default to hunting for in research.
Early sketch of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
2. Keep the stimulus as pure as possible
In Sydney Pollack’s documentary Sketches Of Frank Gehry, he talks about Gehry’s relationship with the sketch.
Sketches, according to Gehry, are the purest expression of the idea – the closest thing to the vision of what might be. Sketches aren’t dragged down by functional explanations of how the structure will actually stand up, they’re just the unadulterated dream. In stimulus terms using the dream allows us to avoid getting lost in the details of plausibility of claims or comprehension of features, and focus on why the idea excites, or fails to excite. Of course this might not be possible if you’re gathering reactions to packaging routes A B and C, but for more exploratory work it’s an invaluable principle.
If you have a spare hour-and-twenty-ish (come on, you can do it), it’s worth watching the documentary.